Dustin Lamore works in the kitchen at an eldercare home in Shelburne, helping to prepare meals for 200 people each day. He’s also blind, which makes getting to work from his Colchester residence each morning a challenge.
The 36-year-old makes use of a state program that provides free, on-demand rides to older adults and people with disabilities. In Chittenden County, Green Mountain Transit has long contracted with the Special Services Transportation Agency, or SSTA, to shuttle users to medical appointments, grocery stores, church services and job sites.
But that program is running out of money, fast, which could leave Lamore without a way to get to work as soon as next month.
“You’re talking about taking away my only mode of transportation,” Lamore said. “I’m beyond frustrated.”
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Lamore and others who use the program in Chittenden County are facing new restrictions on the types of trips they may take and how often they can call for a ride. Rides to work and for personal purposes are most likely to go away, Green Mountain Transit General Manager Clayton Clark said.
“You’re talking about taking away my only mode of transportation.”
Dustin Lamore
Clark said he is reluctant to pare back the service, which helps hundreds of people stay connected with their communities and retain their independence.
“Social isolation is extremely bad for people who are living at home with a disability, or who are older,” he said.
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But in Chittenden County, the Older Adults and Persons with Disabilities Transportation Program has nearly blown through its $455,000 annual budget in a matter of months, prompting a scramble by local and state officials to find more cash and control costs.
Public transit throughout Vermont faces broad fiscal challenges brought on by stagnant ridership and soaring costs. But unlike Green Mountain Transit’s fixed-route bus service, the on-demand program for older and disabled residents has seen big increases in riders. More than 600 people used the service in Chittenden County last year, and ridership has jumped nearly 25% so far this fiscal year, Clark said.
The cost per ride has spiked as well, not just in Chittenden County. Since the pandemic, fewer people drive the shuttles on a volunteer basis, while consolidation in the state’s health care industry has led to longer trip distances to medical appointments, said Ross MacDonald, public transit program manager for the Vermont Agency of Transportation.
And with a rapidly aging population, officials don’t expect demand to ease anytime soon.
But at a select board meeting Tuesday night in Colchester, Lamore and others told their elected leaders that the restrictions would disrupt their lives.
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Rider Debbie Drewniak, 67, said she uses the shuttles to shop for groceries and get to her frequent medical and physical therapy appointments. She’s had limited mobility since a distracted driver struck her while she was walking her Labrador in 2011. The accident also left her with a traumatic brain injury.
“Most of my friends work and are not available to bring me anywhere during the day,” she said.
Drewniak learned of imminent restrictions in a letter she received last month from Green Mountain Transit. The agency has since pushed the changes back until late February, and is allowing towns to pay for additional rides out of their local budgets.
The state transportation agency set aside $265,000 to help shore up the program in Chittenden County. Green Mountain Transit also expects to spend as much as $100,000 from its reserves, and select board members in Williston signaled their intent last week to contribute more municipal funds to limit new trip restrictions. Colchester town leaders said Tuesday that they would look for volunteer drivers and other ways to ease the burden on users there.
The proposed restrictions in Chittenden County — which took effect in Washington, Grand Isle and Franklin counties last month — mirror those that have been in place in other Vermont counties for years.
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Northeast Kingdom residents have long been limited to four trips to medical appointments and two to grocery stores per month, Rural Community Transportation spokesperson Lilias Ide said.
Unless others step up, that may be the direction that Chittenden County is headed, too. “We’ve got a lot of work to do to address costs,” MacDonald said.
Lamore said he already tries to limit his use of the service as much as possible. Of the 12 trips he needs to get back and forth to his job at the eldercare home each week, he’s able to arrange private transportation for nine of them.
His continued financial independence, Lamore said, could hinge on whether he can find a ride for the other three.
A person holds a giant penny at a mock funeral for the coin, which was discontinued in 2025, in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
What good is a penny at this point? Penny candy is a thing of the past, and a modern-day penny-pincher wouldn’t get very far if this were their get-rich strategy.
(This newsletter, though, costs you less than a penny. Chip in if you can.)
U.S. mints no longer make pennies, a decision that saves taxpayers an estimated $56 million annually. When the U.S. Treasury Department announced the country would stop minting them, it marked the end of an era — sorta.
Though those pesky copper-colored coins remain in circulation, some businesses, both in Vermont and nationwide, have begun experiencing penny shortages.
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Enter H.837. The bill outlines a plan that could allow retailers to phase out the penny by rounding up or down cash transactions to the nearest nickel.
Other states, including Arizona and Indiana, have passed rounding legislation, and a handful of others are considering it. As written, Vermont’s bill wouldn’t require rounding, a similar approach favored in other jurisdictions.
Some Vermont businesses have already adopted rounding. But lobbyists for Vermont businesses say some of their members fear the practice — without explicit state blessing — could open a business up to a lawsuit over alleged unfair and deceptive practices.
Worried or not, rounding will likely become more necessary as pennies get harder to find, Maggie Lenz, a lobbyist for the Vermont Retail and Grocers Association, told the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Tuesday. She encouraged the state to create a rounding framework, but discouraged lawmakers from making such a program mandatory.
Rep. Tony Micklus, R-Milton, agreed that rounding should be optional, but said the state should mandate a specific rounding framework for the businesses that choose to round.
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H.837’s approach, which would round down totals ending in 1,2,6 and 7 cents, and round up totals ending in 3, 4, 8 and 9 cents, would seem to be the fairest to consumers and businesses, those who testified agreed.
But the change is likely not net neutral. Zachary Tomanelli, a consumer protection advocate for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, cited a Federal Reserve study that indicated rounding could cost consumers $6 million annually nationwide. That’s because businesses price goods in ways that tend to lead to rounding up.
He called the cost modest and said he generally supported the bill.
Despite H.837 not making it past the crossover deadlines, there’s still hope that pennies might make it into Vermont’s currency cemetery. Rep. Michael Marcotte, R-Coventry, the commerce committee’s chair, said his committee could stick the rounding legislation in the Senate’s economic development bill.
That said, you might not want to ditch your pennies quite yet.
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In the know
Here are some numbers for you: Between 2012 and 2022, Vermont’s primary care workforce declined by 13%. In that same time period, the specialist workforce grew by 23%. That’s according to testimony Jessa Barnard, with the Vermont Medical Society, gave to lawmakers in the House Health Care Committee Tuesday. She said the numbers are reflective of a trend in medicine nationwide, attributed to the fact that primary care docs often make less but pay the same high cost for medical school as their peers in more specialized roles.
In Vermont, Barnard said that this widening gap is leading to a particularly acute shortage. According to a report her organization put out in 2022, the state needs 115 primary care providers to meet the national benchmark for our population size. That figure includes OBGYNs, pediatricians and family medicine docs. By 2030, as our state’s population grows even older, the Vermont Medical Society expects the state to need 370 more primary care physicians to meet the national benchmark.
— Olivia Gieger
Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, spoke with members of the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Tuesday afternoon about S.327, an economic development bill that supports a number of public resources for business owners across the state.
The bill has had a tough go of it so far.
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Clarkson handed out copies of what she referred to as “the actual bill,” which meant the package voted out by her own Senate Economic Development Committee before being “pretty much fully gutted” on its way through the Senate Appropriations Committee.
In a tight budget year, she said, this bill’s focus was on “supporting what works really well” for Vermont businesses. For Clarkson, that means continuing to invest in the initiatives like the Vermont Economic Growth Incentive program, a set of grants to help businesses expand in the state, which is scheduled to end in January. The Senate, she pointed out, has voted to extend the program for several years in a row, most recently through S.327.
“I am charging the House with doing the same thing,” she said.
Clarkson is also in favor of deepening the state’s relationships with outside investors by funding state delegates abroad. Vermont, she argued, should have more well-placed representation in areas like Québec — which this bill would provide for — and in the future Taiwan, which recently pledged to invest heavily in U.S. tech industries.
“We need somebody whose hand is up saying ‘yes, over here!’” Clarkson said.
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House commerce members met informally with a delegation from Taipei later Tuesday.
— Theo Wells-Spackman
On the move
The Senate advanced a bill Tuesday that would allow parents in Essex County to pay tuition to send pre-K students to New Hampshire schools.
In Vermont’s most rural county, families struggle to access pre-K programs, at least on this side of the border.
But S.214, legislation originally proposed by Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast, would allow for a handful of families near the New Hampshire border in Essex County to tuition their pre-K-aged children to New Hampshire schools, Sen. Steve Heffernan, R-Addison, said on the Senate floor.
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Kindergarten through grade 12 are already able to tuition to New Hampshire schools.
The Senate will need to vote on the bill once more before sending it to the House.
Vermont and the federal government faced off Monday over the state’s first-in-the nation law aimed at forcing polluters to pay for the effects of climate change with the Trump administration warning it would spur “the type of chaos that the Constitution is designed to prevent.”
The hearing before Judge Mary Kay Lanthier of the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont comes as the administration has unleashed a broad assault on state-based climate efforts, including suing to invalidate the Vermont law establishing a “climate superfund” to recoup money from the oil and gas industry.
The Biden appointee did not tip her hand, pressing attorneys for the state and the federal government over whether the state is within its rights or stepping on federal authority. The administration is challenging a similar law in New York, and a ruling against Vermont would likely jeopardize that law and chill efforts in other states to adopt climate superfunds.
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Vermont argued the law — “a modest action” — was passed by state lawmakers in 2024 to help raise money to deal with climate change.
RUTLAND, Vt. (WCAX) – Attorneys defended Vermont’s landmark climate superfund law on Monday, as it faces a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration.
Vermont lawmakers passed the Climate Superfund Act in 2024 after devastating flooding in 2023 and other extreme weather events.
The law requires certain large fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of climate-related damage linked to their emissions between 1995 and 2024.
It is being challenged by the federal government, along with the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and attorneys general from 24 Republican-led states.
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They argue Vermont is overstepping and that climate policy should be handled at the federal level.
Attorneys for Vermont and environmental groups asked a federal judge in Rutland to dismiss those challenges, arguing the state has the right to hold companies accountable.
“It was an intense and technical day of legal arguments over whether the Climate Superfund Act passes muster under federal law, and whether it is appropriate under our Constitution and other doctrines, and is going to survive this series of lawsuits that have been filed against it,” said Christophe Courchesne of the Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Vermont was the first state to pass a law like this. New York followed, and more than 10 other states are considering similar measures.
This case could help decide whether those laws move forward.
